BeagleBone Black Becomes A Handheld Classic Gaming Console

July 30, 2013 by 13 Comments

Over at TI, the 2013 Intern Design Challenge is underway, an opportunity for the interns of TI to flex their engineering muscle for a few prizes and a chance to have their designs turned into actual products. We’re thinking [Max] might just pull this one out with his BeagleBone Gaming Cape, an add-on to the BeagleBone Black that turns this ARM-powered Linux board into a retro gaming system.

The build was inspired by [Max]’s earlier MSP430 Launchpad GamingPack, an add-on board for the Launchpad that put two NES controllers, a VGA out, and an FPGA to create a custom gaming console that’s up there with the brightest and best consoles of the 16-bit era. For the new BeagleBone-based build, [Max] eschewed off-board processing, but did manage to include a magnetometer/accelerometer and an audio codec IC to provide the best gaming experience for all those NES, Game Gear. Gameboy, GBA and Doom .wad games.

In addition to a fabulous piece of hardware, [Max] also has the case design down to a tee. He first printed out a dozen or so layers of his case, sandwiching the BeagleBone, his cape, battery holders, and LCD display. Once he knew the dimensions would work, he sent his files off to be laser cut out of a matte black delrin. The finished piece is a work of art, and considering how well everything goes together, we wouldn’t mind giving this new retro-gaming console a spin ourselves.

Tools And Talent For Custom Platinum Jewelry

July 30, 2013 by No comments

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The diamond engagement ring is arguably the most universally adopted of all jewelry. It’s artwork that even the most common men and women appreciate, and it’s creation calls for skills that go back centuries. [Jerome Kelty] crafts custom jewelry from platinum. Here’s an in-depth look at his process.

The first step of his Instructable post is so long you might be fooled into thinking it’s the whole post. He shows off the equipment that he used in taking this ring from design to reality — we thought the use of beeswax to pick up small stones is an interesting technique.

Click through the steps to see that he starts with a cad drawing. This model is sent offsite for casting and arrives back as an oversized blank which he then begins to clean up. A range of differend files bring it to its finished shape. He preps the areas where stones will be set. A trip to the buffing wheel gives it the shine it needs before the diamonds are put in place.

Regular Hackaday readers may recognize his name. When [Jerome] isn’t making jewelry he’s building animatronics, like Predator or Stargate replicas.

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Self-contained Time-lapse Rig Braves Elements From Thirty Feet

July 30, 2013 by 28 Comments

Perspective is a bit hard to grasp in this image, but all of this hardware is mounted thirty feet above the ground. This time-lapse photography box makes use of the sun and a Raspberry Pi to document the goings on. The rig is one of three that were built by [Patty Chuck] to record progress on a seventy acre construction site over the course of eighteen months. The gallery linked above shows off the project well, but a much more in-depth text description is found in his Reddit thread.

What’s not shown in the image is a solar array which powers the box. When they were installed there were no utilities on site. To guard against power-loss there’s a hardware RTC that keeps ticking. The Raspberry Pi uses GPIO pins to switch the Nikon D7100 camera on once every five minutes during the work day. It snaps a photo before powering it down again. It also monitors a temperature sensor and actuates circulation fans if necessary.

He’s planning to post the videos once the project’s done in 18 months. If you see them and remember this post, send us the link and we’ll post the update.

Racing Telemetry On A Cockpit View

July 30, 2013 by 10 Comments

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[Martin] has a Lotus Elise and access to a track. Sounds like fun, huh? The only problem is that the dashcam videos he makes are a little bit boring. Sure, they show him flying around the track, but without some sort of data it’s really hard to improve his driving skills. After thinking about it for a while, [Martin] decided he could use his Raspberry Pi and camera module to record videos from the dashboard of his car, and overlay engine data such as RPM, throttle, and speed right on top of the video.

Capturing video is the easy part of this build – [Martin] just connected his Raspi camera module and used the standard raspivid capture utility. Overlaying data on this captured video was a bit harder, though.

[Martin] had previously written about using the Raspi to read OBD-II data into his Raspi. Combine this with a Python script to write subtitles for his movies, and he’s off to the races, with a video and data replay of every move on the track.

The resulting movie and subtitle files can be reencoded to an HD movie. Reencoding a 13 minute HD video took 9 hours on the Raspi. We’d suggest doing this with a more powerful compy, but at least [Martin] has a great solution to fix his slightly uninformative track videos.

2013 Open Hardware Summit Badge Includes EPaper Display

July 29, 2013 by 23 Comments

Take a look at this sexy piece for open hardware. It’s what you’ll be wearing around your neck at the Open Hardware Summit this year. WyoLum teamed up with Repaper for the display and Seeed Studios for the boards.

It’s called the BADGEr and it’s both an Arduino and and Arduino shield. There are several different power options; coin-cell, microUSB, unpopulated barrel jack, or the lanyard terminals if you want to wear the power supply around your neck. You can see the five momentary push buttons see above, but on the back you’ll find the microSD card slot along with a power switch for preserving the coin cell.

Check out the video below for a quick look. In addition to acting as your credentials the conference schedule comes preloaded. And of course, this is an Open Source design so you can dig through schematic, board artwork, and code at the page linked above. Oh, and the first hack has already been pulled off. Here’s the badge reading Crime and Punishment.

Speaking of conference badges, DEF CON starts this week. Hackaday writer [Eric Evenchick] will be there and we hope he has a chance to look in on some of the badge hacking at the event.

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Headless Tethering Between Raspberry Pi And IPhone

July 29, 2013 by 1 Comment

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This hack doesn’t necessarily have a target application. But there’s a lot of potential. It’s a headless setup for tethering your Raspberry Pi to an iPhone. Building sensor arrays that upload to the Internet (live or just to dump its logs)  immediately comes to mind. But we’re sure there are a ton of other applications just waiting to be thought of.

Tethering is pretty simple with the Raspberry Pi. Just install a few packages that are available in the repositories and make a quick configuration file tweak to allow hot-plugging. But this is dependent on the iPhone being mounted and that task is normally only automatic if the GUI is running. To get by without the X desktop [Dave Controy] walks through the ifuse setup to mount the phone from command line. The result is that your RPi will establish a network connect whenever the iPhone is plugged into it, without any intervention from you.

[Thanks Michael]

Chromecast Bootloader Exploit

July 29, 2013 by 29 Comments

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Well that didn’t take long. The team over at GTVHacker have worked their magic on Chromecast. The HDMI dongle announced by Google last week was so popular they had to cancel their 3-free-months of Netflix perk. We think the thing is worth $35 without it, especially if we end up seeing some awesome hacks from the community.

So far this is just getting your foot in the door by rooting the device. In addition to walking through the exploit the wiki instructions give us a lot more pictures of the internals than we saw from the teardown in yesterday’s links post. There’s an unpopulated pad with seventeen connections on the PCB. You can patch into the serial connections this way, running at a 115200 8n1. But you won’t have terminal access out of the box. The exploit uses a vulnerability in the bootloader to flash a hacked system folder which provides root. After wiping the cache it reboots like normal but now you can access a root shell on port 23.

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